Perception of the evolution of prosody in the French broadcast news style

This study makes use of advances in automatic speech processing to analyse French audiovisual archives and the perception of the journalistic style evolution regarding prosody. Three perceptual experiments were run, using prosody transplantation, delexicalisation and imitation. Results show that the fundamental frequency and duration correlates of prosody enable old-fashioned recordings to be distinguished from more recent ones. The higher the pitch is and the more there are pitch movements on syllables which may be interpreted as word-initially stressed, the more speech samples are perceived as dating back to the 40s or the 50s.